Understanding and Tweaking Windows XP Services

@ 2005/05/06

The reason for this occasional slow performance is the same reason why Microsoft Windows XP runs considerably slower than Windows 2000 at times; it's what's going on in the background. Every modern operating system needs to run certain processes constantly, regardless of what other programs and operations are currently active and regardless of what the user may be doing. These background processes may be used to detect new hardware, monitor the network for incoming data, or a variety of other things that require the operating system to pay constant attention to its surroundings. In Windows XP, these background processes are called Services and they will be the topic of this edition. We're going to look at what the WinXP Services are and do, why they are necessary, which ones should be running on your system and which ones you can do without.